Service request execution architecture for a communications service provider

Abstract

A service request execution architecture promotes acceptance and use of self-service provisioning by consumers, leading to increased revenue and cost savings for the service provider as consumers order additional services. The architecture greatly reduces the technical burden of managing exceptions that occur while processing requests for services. The architecture accelerates the process of fulfilling requests for services by efficiently and effectively reducing the system resources needed to process exceptions by eliminating redundant exceptions corresponding to related service requests.

Description

PRIORITY CLAIM[0001]This application claims the benefit of EPO Application No. 07 425 529.0, filed Aug. 13, 2007 assigned attorney docket number 10022-1014, which is incorporated herein by reference in its entirety.BACKGROUND OF THE INVENTION[0002]1. Technical Field[0003]This disclosure concerns identifying and managing service requests. In particular, this disclosure concerns handling service requests and their related exceptions in a service provider architecture.[0004]2. Background Information[0005]The communications industry continues to face demands for more services, and rapid deployment of new services, while the complexity of the underlying technologies providing the services continues to increase. Service providers require systems that provide both residential and commercial consumers the ability to easily activate and manage requests for services directly and at lower prices. Communications service providers recognize the ability of consumers to choose desired services and...

AI Technical Summary

Benefits of technology

[0009]The service request execution architecture (“architecture”) for a communications service provider decouples the complexity of provisioning communication services from the consumer experience. The architecture identifies and manages related service requests corresponding to exceptions that may occur during the course of processing service requests. The architecture efficiently manages exceptions, exception queues, and elegantly orchestrates the processing of related service requests. The architecture accelerates the process of fulfilling requests for services by managing exceptions corresponding to requested services, and locking and unlocking related services corresponding to an exception, upon the occurrence and resolution of an exception. Accordingly, the disclosed service request execution architecture promotes effectiveness of man-machine interaction, particularly promoting acceptance and use of self-service provisioning by consumers, leading to increased cost-savings on the side of the service provider. Particularly, the architecture greatly reduces the technical burden of managing exceptions that occur while processing requests for services.

[0010]The architecture may process service requests broken into a fine level of granularity that promotes the efficient implementation, reuse, and optimization of not only the service requests, but more complicated services built with the granular service requests. Examples of the granular services requests are given in more detail below. In general, the architecture may include a comprehensive set of service requests. For example, the service requests may include a customer create service request, customer modify general date service request, and service order provisioning service request. The architecture may receive service requests and identify attributes (e.g., customer code, account code, organization code, product code, and an order id) of the service requests that define correlation codes. The architecture may use the correlation codes to manage exceptions and related service requests in a coordinated fashion. The architecture may transform the service requests to obtain orchestrated service requests that include corresponding correlation codes. In one implementation, the architecture uses an XSLT (eXtensible Stylesheet language transformation) processor to obtain orchestrated service requests. The architecture uses correlation codes to group and relate multiple orchestrated service requests. The architecture may compose correlation codes using varying numbers of attributes, and the number of attributes may be based on the characteristics of the corresponding service request.

Problems solved by technology

The communications industry continues to face demands for more services, and rapid deployment of new services, while the complexity of the underlying technologies providing the services continues to increase.

Provisioning communication services involves many complex and technical details, and often results in exceptions occurring during the process of obtaining customer information and provisioning services.

Unfortunately, the lack of ready-to-use services available from business support systems (BSS) capable of supporting standard processes of communication providers creates technical challenges for service providers.

The complexity of new operational support systems (OSS) deployed in support of new network services also creates technical challenges for service providers desiring to hide the complexity from consumers.

The continuous desire of providers to differentiate their services from each other drives OSS to introduce more sophisticated services and complex technologies, in addition to life-cycle maintenance issues.

The many technical challenges facing service providers include not only improving the experience of consumers in the context of activating and using services, but actually carrying through with a service request and successfully activating the service.

Current self-provisioning systems currently overwhelm and confuse consumers, discourage consumers from self-provisioning communications services, and the use of such self-provisioning capabilities.

Communication service providers currently direct scarce resources to assisting consumers to provision services at the expense of focusing resources on developing and delivering new services.

The technical challenges include providing robust and dynamic user interfaces, workflow solutions that provide efficient and elegant exception handling, and service request orchestration.

Unfortunately, current systems may require a consumer to respond to an unreasonable number of exceptions in the course of activating or deactivating a service, further frustrating the consumer.

Furthermore, current systems may themselves become the victims of runaway error propagation (e.g., exceptions), leading to overwhelmed system resources, multitudes of partially completed provisioning service requests, and time consuming, expensive, and technically challenging exception resolution.

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